INTRODUCTION by C. L. Sonnicftsen The Texas State College of Mines and Metallurgy, when I first saw it on the morning of june 3,1931, was part of the University of Texas family, but to me it looked like the poorest of poor relations. Four odd-looking buildings out in the rocky landscape, a mile and a half north of downtown El Paso, were grouped casually around a tall, discouraged-looking hill as if someone had tossed them there. A power house and a small stuccoed residence were in the area (it could hardly be called a campus). That was all. No paving. No landscaping. No people. It was Sunday and the place was deserted, as quiet as a graveyard. I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as I looked around. I was a tenderfoot from the East and did not yet realize that Southwestern deserts are magnificent. I could not know then, and did not know for a long time, how much it had cost the civic leaders of El Paso, the local representatives in the state legislature, and the top men of the college to place those four gaunt buildings out there among the rocks. I had some private worries which made the prospect seem even more bleak. I was two days late for classes, having taken my doctor's oral the day my prospective students were registering two thousand miles away. There had been no time to prepare for my classes, and one of my two advanced English courses was not familiar to me. Three days on the train had given me time to get up my lectures for the first day, but not for the second. Would I make it through the summer? W. W. Lake of the Chemistry Department, director of the summer session, had met me at the train station and found me a place to live on the campus. Burges Hall, the easternmost building, was a combination dormitory, dining hall, and locker room for the football team. The male mining students slept, ate, and played poker there. The students called it Keno Hall. There was a good deal of folklore about the place, but it was quiet during the summer.
This all-purpose building was presided over by Professor Anton H. Berkman, an amply proportioned Texan who had been an army sergeant during the First World War, where he had developed an instinct for Taking Charge. He managed most college functions with great energy and efficiency-everything from faculty picnics to faculty and student seating at commencement exercises. He always looked, and was, worried and determined, but he got things done. We became friends at once and fell into a regular routine. We got up at five, got dressed, and went down to the Ramona Hotel for breakfast. The place did not have a very good reputation but it served family-style meals; it took a good deal of food to fuel Berkman for the day's activities. We were back on campus by seven, spent the morning in classroom and office, and labored the rest of the day and a good part of the night getting ready for tomorrow. My students were bright and industrious, many of them teachers, and our relations were good. They complained a bit about the length of my assignments, a pattern which persisted in my professional life for the next forty years. I never thought an education should come easy. We were in a transitional period that summer of 1931. The college was to become a four-year liberal arts institution with its own president. The Bachelor of Arts degree was to be added to the Bachelor of Science in Mining. Two deans, already on the grounds, would continue to administer their divisions, but the president would no longer be the president of the far-off University of Texas at Austin. Dean]ohn W. Kidd, a short, round man with a raspy voice and a sardonic eye, was in charge of engineering and mathematics. He was also in charge of buildings and grounds, a position which enabled him to indulge in his greatest pleasure-blasting. In the early thirties he dynamited tons of rock to make new rooms on the lower level of the Main Building, and it pleased him to set a jack hammer going directly under the desk of an English
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